There was a time when $1 trillion in debt made front-page alarm. It took over 200 years to reach the first trillion, nearly a decade for the second. Then the 21st century snapped something. $10T to $30T took 14 years. Now a trillion barely lasts a fiscal season. The jump from $37T to $38T took 71 days.
The improvement to finance is profound. Transactions that took days now settle in seconds. Investments once requiring millions can be accessed for a few dollars. Transparency becomes standard because every trade is recorded on the blockchain. Fewer intermediaries mean lower fees, and fractional ownership brings liquidity to previously frozen markets. A building in New York, a sculpture in Paris, or a bond in Tokyo could all exist as tokens — traded globally, 24/7, without friction.
Markets have a rhythm — sometimes elegant, sometimes erratic — but always cyclical. For all the talk of endless rallies and perpetual bull markets, the statistical reality is humbling: stocks ...
Welcome to the main event — Wall Street versus Washington, a bout so choreographed it makes professional wrestling look spontaneous. The Fed steps into the ring, promising to “fight inflation,” while quietly greasing the ropes with liquidity. Congress takes its corner, talking tough about “balancing the budget,” but somehow the debt ceiling keeps rising like an encore. Investors, meanwhile, sit ringside pretending to “trust the system,” even as they know the match is fixed.
Government “plans” always sound like a hangover cure invented at 3 a.m. — equal parts moonshine, aspirin, and prayer. Treasury Secretary Bessent wants to re-industrialize America by flattening the Fed and inflating the dollar like a Macy’s parade balloon. It worked once, during WWII, when bureaucrats put the Fed on a leash and barked orders about bond yields. But like most government solutions, it came with all the subtlety of a bar fight. The irony? To make Main Street great again, Bessent is doubling down on the same money-printing racket he claims to despise.
The words “IS” and “SHOULD” are fascinating little beasts to define. What is happening? What should happen? Two entirely different universes, and yet traders — and yes, entire newsrooms — mash them together like a bad cocktail. Back when I was starting out, I lived in the land of “SHOULD.” It was my natural habitat. The dollar should weaken, inflation should push gold higher, markets should reward my uncanny foresight. Except they didn’t. They don’t care. And what fascinates me most is that the financial media seems just as drunk on “SHOULD” as I once was. Turn on the television and you’ll see it everywhere: anchors dutifully reporting what is happening — GDP growth, rate cuts, deficits — then immediately pivoting to some sweeping sermon about what should happen because of it. The result? A murky stew where hard facts and wishful thinking blend together until nobody can tell which is which. And if you’re trading off that brew, you’re not an investor — you’re a mystic with a margin account.
Financial literacy is knowing how money really works—earning it, saving it, investing it, and not getting fleeced by every smooth-talking banker or politician. It’s the street-smart skill of making cash decisions that keep you rich, not broke.
Let’s be clear: these aren’t your average index funds. Covered call ETFs are built to capture income from chaos. By writing options on stocks they already own, they lock in steady premiums no matter how wild the market swings. Investors are hungry for this strategy, and why shouldn’t they be? It’s one of the few places where uncertainty can pay.
Wealth is all the stuff you own that has value — money, houses, land, businesses, stocks, and even assets like art or gold. Wealth inequality means that some people have way more of this stuff than others. Imagine if 10 kids were in a room and one kid had 95 candy bars, while the other nine kids had to share and fight over the remaining five candy bars between them. That’s wealth inequality.
Enter Buffett. No fanfare, no hints dropped to CNBC, no “Buffett tracker” countdown. Just a quiet, $1.6 billion stake built while everyone else was chasing shiny objects in tech. And then — boom — the filing hits in mid-August. $UNH rips higher. Traders pile in. Investors nod like old sages. One disclosure. Two reactions. But the bigger story? Buffett just planted his flag in the middle of a battlefield most investors were too scared to step foot on.
